The New YorkerModify

Sometime in the mid-two-thousands, when people would still hand you cassette tapes or CDs at shows or in record stores or during hangouts in someone’s parents’ basement or smoke-filled apartment, I was passed a dubbed copy of Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s 1986 album“Keyboard Fantasies.” It was a blank cassette in a clear case with the words “KEYBOARD FANTASY” scrawled across the front, the slight misspelling seemingly due to the fact that whoever wrote it ran out of space.

“Keyboard Fantasies” was a self-released project, made with only two instruments—a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer and a Roland TR-707 drum machine—but it sounded expansive: stabs of synth blending with high-pitched drones of flute, winding and bending electronic notes. Copeland was inspired by sounds from the natural surroundings near his home at the time, in Huntsville, Ontario—rushing water, wind cutting through trees. His father was a pianist, and Copeland, now eighty-two, trained as a classical vocalist from the age of fifteen. (In 1961, he became one of the first Black students to attend McGill University’s music program.) A standout song on the album, “Let Us Dance,” showcased Copeland’s singular voice, which ranged from swellingly operatic to deeply serene. I remember feeling stunned that a single person could hold within him that choir of sounds. The album did not have a wide audience at the time of its release; only a handful of tapes were put out and sold. But, thanks in large part to a Japanese collector, Ryota Masuko, who proselytized in the twenty-tens, Copeland built an underground reputation as an overlooked pioneer of the electronic/synth genre.

Before “Keyboard Fantasies,” Copeland had released two folk albums, but his main work was as a songwriter and performer on the Canadian children’s show “Mr. Dressup.” In a clip from around the same time that “Keyboard Fantasies” was released, Copeland, playing the head of a trading post in Mr. Dressup’s neighborhood, fishes out a birdlike puppet and sings it a song. It’s fascinating to think of him inhabiting two worlds simultaneously—performing songs for children and, in his spare hours, making complex and adventurous ambient music—but the two modes would each end up shaping Copeland’s quietly influential career. Since the nineteen-nineties, Copeland’s primary musical collaborator has been his life partner, Elizabeth, a writer and a performing artist. In recent decades, they have only sporadically released new music—“The Ones Ahead,” from 2023, was the first Copeland album issued under his own name after coming out as a trans man, in 2002. Now, on February 6th, the Copelands are releasing their latest album, “Laughter in Summer,” which comprises voice-and-piano reimaginings of past songs, many of them accompanied by choral arrangements.

The project evolved out of an informal recording session. In the summer of 2025, the Copelands were offered two free days in a studio in Montreal, and they hired a choir to sing with them. In a recent video call, Elizabeth told me, “It was just, let’s put this stuff down so we have it to listen to.” They sang a new version of “Let Us Dance” with the choir, then mixed another recording from the choir’s warmups; the two versions both appear on the album, as “Let Us Dance (Movement One)” and “Let Us Dance (Movement Two),” the opener and closer, respectively. The two takes sound similar, but they both differ mightily from the original, which was accompanied by synthesizers layered atop the note of wind chimes rhythmically clattering, and keyboard effects that mimicked the tone of short horn bursts. Copeland’s voice sounds as rich and flexible as it did back then. Elizabeth told me that the songs serve as a reminder to young musicians about the virtues of live, unadulterated recordings. “So many of them rely on the tricks in the studio–put a little Auto-Tune here, a little A.I. there, let’s add, subtract, multiply, and divide,” she said. “There’s not a lot of artists these days who can go in and do something live off the floor one time. The album is what you heard. If you were standing in the room that day, that’s what you would’ve heard.”

During our call, the couple sat, shoulder to shoulder, in a teal room in their home in Hamilton, Ontario, backdropped by books and records. Elizabeth did most of the talking. In September of 2024, Copeland revealed that he’d been diagnosed with dementia, and that they’d been managing the disease privately for some time. “Laughter in Summer” is the first album since the revelation, but it would be a moving project even without the reality of the illness’s mounting toll. There is a sense of wonder on the new recordings, a search for the depths of a single piece, or a single place, or a single emotional curiosity. The songs find an artist picking through his established works and seeing which parts of them might be illuminated anew. It’s moving, too, because there is no evading the humanness of this record—the collision of actual human voices working in tandem. Elizabeth told me, “To practice any craft, you have to be able to listen and hear the world—hear something other than yourself.”

“Children’s Anthem,” one of the first creative collaborations between Elizabeth and Beverly as a couple, written in 2007 for an anti-bullying conference, is revived on “Laughter in Summer” as a sparse piano-and-voice duet. Toward the end of the track, when Beverly and Elizabeth’s voices blend together, the singing begins to feel spiritual, more like a prayer for an aching world than an ode to those who must endure it. “Harbour,” originally from “The Ones Ahead,” features Elizabeth singing a love song that Beverly wrote to her, providing the breathtaking experience of hearing the “you” in the lyrics become a two-way mirror: “Don’t you know that you’re the deep / Where water, earth and fire meet?” This is not the transformation typical of a cover song or a rerecording. It is a confirmation of reciprocal attention and admiration. The choral elements on the record shine most vividly on the title track, which features polyphonic swells of voices humming melodies, overtaking the piano, dropping and then rising again.

There is a simplicity to a song like “Children’s Anthem” that comes, undoubtedly, from Copeland’s years of making music for children, who need to be able to hear and understand and, hopefully, sing along. I told the couple that I was hesitant to use the word “simple,” because it sounded almost derogatory. “Well, it’s not simple in an inane kind of way,” Elizabeth said. “It’s simple because it has to make a lot of space. It has to make a lot of space for much of life’s joys and sorrows. We make our songs the way we do because we want to leave room for clarity of generosity, of warmth. Because we are at a critical juncture. There are things to be terrified of. But our power is about awakening something beyond fear and cynicism in the human nervous system. Our songs attempt to remind people that simplicity, and innocence, is a kind of power.” Beverly, a longtime practicing Buddhist, told me that he doesn’t really consider himself to be the creator of his music. “I feel that the songs are sent from a higher source. And when they arrive you can say yes or no to them. The good news is that, so far, I have said yes.” Elizabeth replied that she’s never seen him say no, and Beverley smiled, then said, “No, I suppose I haven’t. But there may be a time when I no longer have the facilities to say yes.”

Copeland’s story is one of late-career adoration, but his trajectory also suggests the limitations of being a so-called cult figure. He is a Black trans elder who has built a legacy as an unsung hero of the music world; the problem is that being a symbol of wisdom or endurance doesn’t always translate to material success. In early 2020, capitalizing on the new excitement for Copeland’s music, the couple was set to take off on a world tour. Then the pandemic hit, and all of the shows were cancelled. The Copelands had sold their house not long before, with the idea that they would return from the road and settle into a new one. Now, suddenly, they had no money coming in to cover a mortgage. Beverly’s daughter, Faith, started a GoFundMe for the couple, which raised nearly a hundred thousand dollars, allowing them to buy a small, temporary home in Nova Scotia. Online today, you can find a sealed pressing of “Keyboard Fantasies” selling for more than seventeen hundred dollars. Beverly told me, jokingly, “If I were to die, they would be worth way more. Sometimes I want to fake that I’m dead.”

He and Elizabeth brought up Jackie Shane, another Black trans American artist who lived in Canada. Shane recorded a run of singles and a stunning live album on Caravan Records, in 1967, but had retired from music by the early nineteen-seventies, spending time taking care of her ailing mother and stepfather in Nashville. For years, the few people who knew of her work were unsure whether or not Shane was still alive. Beginning near the end of her life, in 2019, there was renewed interest in her music. Old albums were unearthed, bootlegged, and reissued. A documentary film, “Any Other Way,” was released in 2024. This process of rediscovery was both wonderful for the public and heartbreaking for Shane, who might have had a different life and career if she had been appreciated in her time.

Perhaps Copeland’s career was simply a series of misalignments. He was once ahead of his time, and then the world caught up, but when the world did finally catch up he could not reap the long-awaited fruits of his brilliance. Part of the beauty of an album such as “Laughter in Summer” is that it might, once again, inspire an audience to seek out the original recordings of Copeland’s songs. Elizabeth spoke of the years when Beverly was writing music prolifically with little recognition.“If he had been willing to put on a skirt and wear some lipstick, maybe his music would’ve gotten out there more, or if he’d been willing to write more to genre.” She went on, “We’ve both been focussed more on what the meaning of our work is rather than who is or is not paying attention. And the cost of it, at this point in our life, in our elder years, is that we’re just kind of hanging on.” She added, “Glenn has given a lot. I have given a lot. Maybe I haven’t had quite the fame and fortune, but—”

Beverly interjected. “But it’s coming,” he said. ♦

Ignazio Silone’s novel “Bread and Wine” tells the story of Pietro Spina, a socialist and revolutionary who is a wanted man in Fascist Italy, and who, in order to elude capture, disguises himself as a village priest in the Abruzzo countryside. The book, which was published in 1936, is partly a parable about survival and resistance: The villagers awake one morning to find anti-government slogans scrawled on the church steps. They’re alarmed, fearing that the authorities will crack down on them all until the person who did it comes forward. But Spina encourages them to see the graffiti as an act of conscience—without letting on that he, himself, wrote it. “In the land of Propaganda,” he says, “it is enough for one little man to say ‘No!’ murmur ‘No!’ in his neighbor’s ear, or write ‘No!’ on a wall at night.” Such a person may die at the hands of the state, he tells them, but the corpse will keep saying no. “And how can you silence a corpse?”

On January 25th, the day after federal agents killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Cardinal Joseph Tobin, the Archbishop of Newark, spoke during a webinar organized by Faith in Action, a global network of religious leaders and activists. He paraphrased the episode from “Bread and Wine,” and then addressed the participants directly. “How will you say no to violence?” he asked. He urged them to phone members of Congress, who were due to take up the Department of Homeland Security budget, and demand that they “vote against renewing funding for such a lawless organization.” He went on, “How will you say no—scrawl your answer on the wall? Will you help restore a culture of life, in the midst of death?” Tobin’s speech was national news; here was a prelate challenging the Trump Administration in blunt, anguished terms.

Tobin was born in Detroit, in 1952, to parents descended from Irish immigrants, and grew up as the eldest of thirteen children. He is the American cardinal who goes back the longest with the new American Pope, Leo XIV; he became friends with Robert Prevost, as Leo was then known, when they served together in Rome, a quarter century ago. Tobin also made the news earlier in January, when he, together with Cardinal Blase Cupich, of Chicago, and Cardinal Robert McElroy, of Washington, D.C., issued a rare joint statement on U.S. foreign policy. “The events in Venezuela, Ukraine and Greenland have raised basic questions about the use of military force and the meaning of peace,” and about “our country’s moral role in confronting evil around the world,” they said. The cardinals cited a speech that Leo had given to more than a hundred ambassadors to the Vatican, on January 9th, in which he warned that a diplomacy conducted in dialogue “is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies.” The Pope said, “War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading.”

The cardinals’ statement was striking for several reasons. Atypically, it showed U.S. prelates weighing in on foreign affairs. (McElroy is an expert; he earned a Ph.D. in political science at Stanford, with a thesis on morality and U.S. foreign policy.) It came directly from the leaders of three archdioceses, not from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops—which has about four hundred members and a complex process for the drafting of such statements—and it was released a week after that group’s new president, Archbishop Paul Coakley, of Oklahoma City, met with President Donald Trump and Vice-President J. D. Vance, at the White House. And the new Pope is close to all three of its authors: Tobin; Cupich, who served alongside Prevost in Rome in the powerful Dicastery for Bishops; and McElroy, whom Prevost, when he was the head of that office, tapped last year for the high-profile role of Archbishop in the nation’s capital. Their statement suggested that, even if Leo is not the “anti-Trump,” as his statements on peace, immigration, the climate, and the rule of law have led a number of observers to propose, his compadres in the U.S. are speaking up in a strong, clear voice.

On Friday, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in Manhattan, will host the installation of a new Archbishop of New York, who is likely to round out what might be called Leo’s Team U.S.A. Ronald Hicks, the former Bishop of Joliet, Illinois, succeeds Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who reached the nominal retirement age of seventy-five last year. Hicks was born in 1967, grew up in the placid Chicago suburb of South Holland, studied at a seminary on the Southwest Side, spent a year in Mexico, and served in the Archdiocese of Chicago’s parishes and seminaries. In 2005, at the age of thirty-seven, he went to El Salvador, where he worked as a regional director of Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters), a group of residences for orphans and at-risk children which was founded by an American missionary in Mexico in 1954.

Hicks spent five years in El Salvador—a long time for a cleric on the executive track. He has said that his favorite saint is Óscar Romero, the Archbishop of San Salvador, who, as Hicks put it, “walked with his people for justice and peace.” (Romero denounced the military regime in a series of Sunday homilies broadcast nationally on the radio—in effect, scrawling “no” on the church steps. He was murdered while saying Mass, in 1980; in 2018, Pope Francis canonized him.) After returning to Chicago, Hicks served as Cardinal Cupich’s vicar-general, or deputy, then as a bishop, and was known for unshowy efficiency. The initial take on him has been that he is akin to Pope Leo, a Chicagoan who spent his thirties working with the poor as a missionary in Peru and then brought that experience to a series of leadership roles. Hicks has been involved in prison ministry since the nineteen-eighties and, as bishop of Joliet, he took steps to address the climate emergency, following Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on the issue. He appears boyishly pious—on plane flights, he prays the Rosary and watches unobjectionable movies, such as “Harold and the Purple Crayon”—but he is likely to fit right in with the more worldly trio whose company he’ll now keep.

Hicks’s relative youth and low profile make his elevation to big-city archbishop significant. But what’s particularly notable is where he’s becoming an archbishop. Cupich is now seventy-six, so in Chicago it was assumed that Hicks would succeed him. Instead, he’ll be Archbishop of New York—historically, the most prominent post in the U.S. Church. In 1984, Pope John Paul II entrusted it to the bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania, John J. O’Connor, who was little known to the public but shared the Pope’s culture-warrior style. “I want a man just like me in New York,” John Paul was said to have remarked. With Hicks, Leo is appointing a cleric who seems both like himself and distinctly different from the boisterous Cardinal Dolan.

A St. Louis native who worked at the Vatican Embassy in Washington in the late nineteen-eighties, Dolan led the Archdiocese of Milwaukee for seven years before being named to New York, in 2009, by Pope Benedict XVI—a staunch conservative who expected his appointees to oppose what he called a “dictatorship of relativism.” Dolan presented himself as the archbishop of plain talk and good cheer, and he revived O’Connor’s practice of weighing in on the culture wars through the media, first in the tabloids and then on a weekly radio show on SiriusXM. His strategy—some would say his shtick—was to espouse a rock-ribbed Catholic point of view in an irreverent manner. During a taping shortly before he was named a cardinal, in 2012, the Times noted, he exulted over French pastries that one of the producers had brought in and announced, “I am going to give these to a hungry person. Namely me at about 4 o’clock.”

But Dolan’s tenure was fraught in a way that no amount of bonhomie could counter. The election of Pope Francis, in 2013—and his distaste for the culture wars—left Dolan sidelined in Rome. Then the U.S. Church was overtaken by new revelations of clerical sexual abuse—which drew him into legal and financial dealings on a huge scale. Dolan commissioned a program whereby people who claimed to have been abused by priests of the archdiocese could receive compensation, as long as they waived their right to sue. (When a man used the program to accuse Theodore McCarrick, who was by then the Emeritus Archbishop of Washington, D.C., Dolan did the right thing and initiated an investigation. McCarrick, who denied any wrongdoing, was defrocked by Pope Francis.) Last fall, Dolan announced that the archdiocese planned to set aside more than three hundred million dollars to settle claims made against it by some thirteen hundred people —on top of roughly sixty-three million paid through the compensation program. To help fund these payments, Dolan has arranged for the sale of two of the archdiocese’s properties for more than half a billion dollars.

Dolan’s dealings with Trump have been confounding. He gave the prayers of invocation at both of Trump’s Inaugurations. In 2018, he called the first Trump Administration’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents at border crossings “unjust,” “un-biblical,” and a violation of “human dignity.” But two years later, during a mass call-in event of Catholic and conservative leaders, Dolan, greeted by Trump as “a great friend,” responded, “The feelings are mutual, sir,” and joked that his mother said he called Trump more often than he called her. On “Fox and Friends” a few days later, he said, “I really salute his leadership,” declaring that “the President has seemed particularly sensitive to the—what shall I say?—to the feelings of the religious community.” After Trump was elected in 2024, Dolan, citing their conversations, declared that the returning President “takes his Christian faith seriously.” A year ago, after Vice-President Vance claimed that the U.S. bishops ran refugee-resettlement programs with the goal of making money from the government, Dolan, on his weekly show, pushed back against that allegation, but not against the Administration’s policies toward refugees. His reticence was odd, because he has been a champion of Catholic Charities—one of the largest social-service agencies in the city—and he commissioned a vivid new mural at St. Patrick’s, which depicts the Church in New York as one of immigrants, and puts that history on view for the five million people who visit the cathedral each year. In accommodating Trump, though, Dolan aligned himself with a large proportion of American Catholics—and with plenty of other U.S. bishops and clergy.

As Archbishop, Hicks will be in a position to do things differently from the bully pulpit of New York—to carry forward Francis’s pastoral flexibility and identification with people on society’s margins. He speaks Spanish—no small thing, for a city where nearly a million people speak it as a first language. Through his work in El Salvador, he is the first New York Archbishop in memory to bring an everyday encounter with poverty to the job. And he takes office alongside the new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, whose emphasis on affordability aligns with the archdiocese’s work to provide food security and affordable housing to those in need. In these efforts, Hicks will have an apt collaborator in the new C.E.O. of the city’s branch of Catholic Charities: Antonio Fernández, a Spaniard who immigrated to Chicago and led the agency’s office first there and then in San Antonio. Fernández has already met with Mamdani three times.

Hicks’s tenure will coincide with Leo’s papacy, and it will surely unfold in close coördination with the Chicagoan in Rome. Like Leo, Hicks has been thrust into a daunting new role, and, as he settles in, he’ll doubtless get counsel from the cardinals he joins on Team U.S.A., particularly from Tobin, just across the Hudson, in Newark. He might keep Óscar Romero in mind. “When the government began killing priests, nuns and laity,” Hicks wrote, in a piece for the diocesan newspaper of Joliet, in 2022, “Archbishop Romero began to speak against the oppression with a loud and courageous voice. He became known as the ‘voice of the voiceless.’ ” This country does not remotely face the same magnitude of crisis, but the Trump Administration’s disregard of moral and legal norms will likely give the Pope’s new man in New York occasions to speak out. ♦

“My Father’s Shadow,” the first feature by the British Nigerian director Akinola Davies, Jr., has a strong yet elusive element of autobiography. Written by Davies’s older brother, Wale, the film follows two young brothers during Nigeria’s 1993 Presidential election, which offered hope for democracy after a decade of military dictatorship. In the movie’s first dramatic scene, achingly redolent of memory, the brothers—the older is eleven, the younger eight—loll in front of their family’s house, snacking, grousing, playing with paper action figures, trying to fill the solitude and the silence around them with banter and bravado. There’s a timeless feeling of childhood in the unstructured fluidity of their day, teetering on the border of dreaminess and boredom, its possibilities both expanded and limited by the boys’ imagination.

The brothers’ lives, and the movie itself, soon snap into action, with the arrival of their father, Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù). He’s been away for an unspecified while, and, instead of coming home to stay, he’s there to take the boys with him, on a bus to Lagos, where he works in a factory. (Their mother is out on a somewhat mysterious errand, and they leave before she gets back.) The experience is a novel one for the brothers, and their excited curiosity is spotlighted in glances: Davies’s narrative sensibility fastens not just on what the characters do but on what they see, and his schema of editing involves attention-grabbing cuts between observation and action, without blatant visual cues, as if to blur the distinction. The sense of events remembered is suggested by the movie’s evocation of a child’s-eye perspective and reinforced when, far into the story, the name of the younger brother is mentioned: Akinola. (Akinola is played by Godwin Egbo, and Akinola’s older brother, Olaremi, is played by the actor’s brother Chibuike Marvellous Egbo.)

Folarin’s haste in taking his sons suggests trouble. During the bus ride, the brothers glimpse headlines in passengers’ newspapers: the election has been held, but the results haven’t been announced; there have been reports of a massacre at a military base. Their father, a supporter of the opposition candidate, M. K. O. Abiola, gets into a dispute with a passenger who supports the military regime. (In the 1993 election, Abiola was widely believed to have won, but the race wasn’t called, and for nearly two weeks the whole country waited anxiously for the results.) From the children’s fragmentary observations, it seems that their father may be an opposition activist and that his trip has an unspoken political purpose.

One of the most powerful and original aspects of “My Father’s Shadow” is the richness of its context: the civic and social setting isn’t just a backdrop but an integral part of the drama, not explanatory but constitutive. At one point, the bus runs out of gas. Most of the passengers are content to wait for the driver to figure things out, but Folarin persuades a passing truck driver to take him and his sons the rest of the way. The boys don’t know Lagos at all, and Folarin, who grew up there, introduces them to the city proudly. The brothers gaze upon commonplace sights of crowds, peddlers, and buskers with fascination and wonder. But they also catch their father’s wariness when trucks filled with soldiers pass by. “Stupid people,” he says. It’s the first time that the regime’s enforcers make their presence felt but not the last, and even when they’re not in sight the menace that they represent weighs heavily on the story. It hangs over the boys’ experience of Lagos, both in their silent observation of distant events and in closeup encounters with their father’s friends and associates.

Most of the movie takes place in the span of a single day, and two clocks, political and personal, seem to be ticking out of synch, urgently and discordantly. Folarin’s political engagement emerges by chance when he runs into a long-unseen friend (Olarotimi Fakunle), whose nickname, Corridor, reflects his size and his ability to open paths through crowds. Corridor, who addresses Folarin as Kapo and “my leader,” is pessimistic about the chances for democracy. He thinks the regime is digging in and says that it has killed four of their fellow opposition supporters. The boys soon see another headline—“Military Deny Deaths at Bonny Camp”—and, when a fight breaks out in the street, Folarin hustles them away.

The second ticking clock involves an urgent private matter: Folarin hasn’t been paid in six months and shows up at the factory to confront his supervisor and demand his due. But the supervisor won’t be in until the night shift, so to kill time Folarin takes his sons on a series of visits to some friends and some favorite places. The resulting rambles through town, aboard motorcycle taxis on which all three pile up along with the drivers, become, for Folarin, trips through his own memories. He shows his sons sites of his youth, takes them to hang out with his crowd in a bar, and tells them romantic stories of his streetwise courtship of their mother. (A friend chimes in that the couple was considered “a local Romeo and Juliet.”) During a stopover for a quick swim in the sea—a scene that has overtones of the iconic swimming scene in “Moonlight”—Folarin recounts a traumatic story from his childhood: the death, by drowning, of his older brother, for whom Olaremi is named.

In this way, Akinola and Wale Davies establish two parallel awakenings for the brothers in the film, and everything that the boys see and hear—not just dialogue but all their ambient impressions—contribute to one or both. There is a political awakening, triggered by the fearful atmosphere surrounding the electoral crisis and the ensuing military crackdown, which in the film resonates as a shared national memory. The other awakening concerns a second order of memory: family memory. The brothers gradually develop a sense of their parents’ intimate history, which, given that it’s their own backstory, becomes intermingled with their identities and self-images.

All the knowledge—or ignorance—that a viewer brings to a movie, whatever knowledge a viewer gains about the making and the makers, is an inextricable part of the viewing experience. I knew little about Nigeria’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, and so only from the film did I learn that the 1993 election was annulled by the country’s autocratic regime. In the movie, moments after the annulment is announced—on TV while father and sons are in a bar—gunshots are heard. As the streets of Lagos begin to roil with protest and repression, Folarin rushes to get his sons out of the city and to safety. I also learned, from reading interviews with Akinola Davies about “My Father’s Shadow,” that the movie’s unfolding of memory parallels his own. The brothers Davies, far from merely depicting their childhood memories, are in fact making a past for themselves and for a father they didn’t have.

Akinola and Wale Davies’s father died, of an epileptic seizure, when Akinola, born in 1985, was just twenty months old. Wale, like Olaremi in the film, is three years older, so they were just about the ages of the onscreen brothers during the events of 1993. For the movie, they have reconfigured their early days into a counterlife, drawing on what they remember, on family lore that their mother and other relatives have imprinted on them, and on their later visits to Lagos. Davies’s direction reflects the variety of threads on which the movie’s subjectivity is based; one of the film’s most striking scenes occurs in the brothers’ absence. They’ve been sent to play at a shuttered amusement park, whose elderly caretaker (Ayo Lijadu) is a friend of Folarin’s. The friend, recently widowed, reproaches himself at length for the way he treated his wife, and, for the duration of the man’s monologue, the camera holds Folarin in an extended closeup, hinting at unspoken marital discord and pangs of conscience of his own.

The conjuring that Davies and his brother perform has an overarchingly creative spirit, mirroring secondhand memories of their father in the movie’s finely observed detail and the unusual form that unites them. The action is punctuated by flash-frame collages that bring earlier and later observations together in a tumble of associations and hint at the drama’s mystical, phantasmagorical essence. Yet, at one crucial moment, the movie’s composed subjectivity detaches details from context, steering the story from piquant allusiveness into bewildering vagueness. It’s a surprising misstep for a filmmaker who, throughout the rest of “My Father’s Shadow,” evokes paternity as both symbolic and material power.

This scene aside, the director’s detective-like relationship to the movie’s fundamental matter—his father’s absence and the political clamor of his early childhood—is an emotional lever for the distinctive tone that he crafts. The historic crisis makes the personal tale reverberate with an inner immensity. The Davies brothers’ recovered memories yield a private mythology that is simultaneously familial, urban, and national. The unusual power of “My Father’s Shadow,” for all its subjectivity, comes from its elements of impersonality—from the seemingly scriptural authority with which memory is sublimated into myths and relationships into destinies. ♦

In Belle Burden’s memoir, “Strangers,” she describes the end of her marriage. It happened suddenly: until learning of her husband’s infidelity, through a voice mail from a stranger, she had no idea anything was wrong. Burden and her husband shared an apartment in Tribeca and a house on Martha’s Vineyard. They enjoyed romantic Friday-night dinners at a favorite restaurant. Their children thrived at élite private schools. Everything in their lives was curated and refined—ideal to a degree that suggested perfection. “I loved his clothes, the way he dressed for work,” Burden writes—“a navy or charcoal-gray suit, a crisp shirt, a tie with some color . . . the attire of a responsible and trustworthy man.” United in their distaste for “the modern version” of the Hamptons, with its “competing, dressing up, and traffic,” they felt at home at their club on the Vineyard, where members “gathered for cocktail parties in linen blazers and colorful dresses.” Even the smallest details were fine-tuned: Burden writes that, although her husband was busy at his hedge fund, he “started sourcing Halloween candy in September, looking for hard-to-find brands of sour candy to fill our bowl.”

Most of us aren’t as glamorous as Burden, who is a descendant of the Vanderbilts and a granddaughter of the fashion icon Babe Paley. (She remembers how, when she and her husband moved in together, she brought along her youthful belongings—“a mahogany bed, my grandfather’s desk, my father’s Sally Mann photographs.”) Still, we get it when she recounts falling for him: “As I saw him confidently descend the wide, steep stairs at the back of the apartment, tucking in his striped oxford shirt as he held the heavy door for me, I thought, I am going to marry him.” Even if we’ve only read F. Scott Fitzgerald, instead of living in the rarefied world he describes, his particular vision—poised, elegant, just a little debauched—can make us swoon. Or maybe we prefer some other vision: the James Dean good-girl aesthetic in Taylor Swift’s “Style,” or the Beth and Rip thing from “Yellowstone.”

Although style can be superficial, in the best case it reflects something more fundamental—knowledge, judgment, intention, discernment. Taste, in short. “Taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response,” Susan Sontag wrote in “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” from 1964. “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion—and there is taste in acts, taste in morality,” even “taste in ideas.” In her essay, Sontag explored the notion of camp, the appreciation of which requires having “good taste in bad taste.” Today, meanwhile, artificial-intelligence researchers talk about “research taste”: they hope to create algorithms that have intuitions, as the best humans do, about which problems are interesting and which will hit dead ends. We use our taste to perceive, to decide, to think.

All this makes it sound like having taste is something we do—like a tool that we can wield. Often, though, the reverse is the case. “Either you think—or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you,” Nicole Diver muses, in Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.” The world is always telling you what to like; as a result, taste is suspect. When are you expressing your true self, and when are you allowing others to reshape you? Visit one beautifully appointed Brooklyn apartment, and you’ll admire the owners’ taste. Visit ten identical apartments, and you’ll wonder if having perfect taste actually means having none at all.

The worry that taste is deceptive or distracting haunts seemingly every narrative in which it figures. In “Strangers,” Burden wonders how she failed to notice her husband’s unhappiness, and asks how he might have failed to notice it for himself. “I thought I was happy but I’m not,” he tells her. “I thought I wanted our life, but I don’t.” It’s a brutal way to leave a marriage. And yet later a friend tells Burden that the divorce has liberated her real personality, revealing someone who is “lighter, easier, more relaxed. . . . You seem to be letting go of a bigger set of cultural standards, of some sort of externally imposed idea of who you should be.” Living tastefully requires making many small, good decisions, and doing this successfully can give you the sensation of heading in the right direction. But the risk of crafting a picture-perfect life is that you’ll lose sight of the big picture.

Anna and Tom, the protagonists of Vincenzo Latronico’s novel “Perfection,” are “creative professionals” living as expats in Berlin. “Their exact titles varied depending on the job,” Latronico writes. “Web developer, graphic designer, online brand strategist”—the bottom line is that they create “differences.” When a new boutique hotel opens, it needs to communicate its uniqueness within the crowded landscape of taste. Anna and Tom accomplish this through minute shifts to the color palette, or the nuanced application of fonts. “Their style was simple, intimate, in keeping with an aesthetic that was starting to be seen all over the world,” Latronico explains—a “casual coolness” familiar from “every gourmet burger joint and concert poster.”

The couple’s good taste flows from their screens into the physical world, and then back into their screens. On social media, they see an endless grid of airy apartments filled with “stunning plants in bay windows, on plywood shelves, against herringbone parquet.” Soon, their apartment is a greenhouse, too—“Plants appeared out of nowhere, a fully developed skill,” Latronico writes—and this enriches the photographs that they post, when they list their apartment online, so that tourists can rent it. Similarly, after years of making the same sandwiches and spaghetti sauce, they become serious cooks, along with everyone else. Dinners at friends’ houses suddenly involve “elaborate salads sprinkled with seeds and fruit,” and each course is “accompanied by a chorus of compliments and technical remarks.” Latronico notes that “their interest hadn’t been planted by sly marketers, but appeared as if by osmosis, as they observed the little differences all around them.” As members of a tasteful generation, “they were all learning together.”

Collecting vinyl, clubbing at Berghain, contemplating polyamory—this is cool. But Anna and Tom don’t feel free. They’re trapped in the taste matrix that they’ve helped construct. It was their own good taste, after all, that originally compelled them to flee their provincial home town for Berlin; when newer incoming cool-hunters push up the cost of living in the city, it’s taste that nudges them toward Lisbon (“the new Berlin”), where they hope to repeat the cycle. The problem is that data moves faster than they do. When dinner-party pictures can instantaneously travel “to the other end of the planet, bouncing along in low Earth orbit or speeding across ocean ridges,” meaningful distinctions can’t last. In Lisbon, “it was all different, which was what they had wanted; and yet it was also somehow all the same.”

There’s something science-fictional about “Perfection,” and yet it’s an accurate account of how modern taste makes itself felt. Taste is a global force, driving migrations, shifting investments, and dividing us into groups and tribes. Because it’s been so heavily technologized, it now feels unitary, omnipresent—like a wave that sweeps us up but never breaks. Philosophers describe the “problem of expensive tastes”; today’s luxuries become tomorrow’s necessities. For Anna and Tom, that dynamic leads to exile. Driven out of the place they’re from, they’re priced out of most places they might want to go, and can’t be content in the ones they can afford. By the closing act of the novel, although their taste is everywhere, they’re citizens of nowhere.

Marguerite, the heroine of Helen DeWitt’s novella “The English Understand Wool,” is also trapped by taste. She’s spent her whole life in an atmosphere of unimaginable luxury and refinement. Her family lives in Marrakech, but she gets piano lessons from a teacher flown in from Paris. When Marguerite’s mother needs a new suit, she flies to Scotland to buy tweed from “a weaver of real gifts.” Everything in Marguerite’s life is meant to avoid being mauvais ton—in bad taste. During Ramadan, she and her parents go on vacation for the sake of their servants, who are paid anyway. “It would be mauvais ton to be waited upon by persons who were fasting,” Marguerite explains. “It would be mauvais ton to make the exigencies of religion an excuse to curtail their salaries.”

Something happens in Marguerite’s life—it would be mauvais ton to reveal it—and she is forced not just to leave her world of mannered privilege behind but to revise her understanding of who she is. She winds up in New York, where she sells a memoir in a lucrative book deal. But her editor, Bethany, isn’t happy with the draft. “Hi Marguerite,” Bethany writes. “This seems like a lot of backstory, making the reader wait for the main event.” The memoir should be a lurid tell-all, Bethany thinks; she suggests talking to a ghostwriter, who might “knock the text into shape.” Alternatively, she wonders, “Would it help if the two of us met and talked and I just recorded you on my cell to get it all down so there’s something to work with?”

In the end, it’s Marguerite’s good taste that prevents her from succumbing to the pressure to write a tawdry account of her life. This is one quite plausible theory of why taste is valuable: it’s certainly nice to make the most of the little things, but the performance of taste is actually a rehearsal for more important performances to come. If you cultivate taste today, then, later, when the spotlight finds you, you’ll have standards. Maybe you’ll draw on your experiences of discernment, propriety, and virtue as you rise to the occasion. (Of course, the inverse of this theory—that bad taste suggests you’ll perform poorly—is less appealing.)

It’s commonplace for our tastes to be better than we are. When we’re young, we can become very tasteful very quickly; we might know what to read but not how to act, or we might be easily fooled by cool. (When we’re older, meanwhile, we may be able to afford tasteful things that we don’t know how to appreciate.) In Jane Austen’s novels, intelligent young women with good taste often fall for apparently similar young men, only to discover that their suitors’ taste is only skin deep; they realize, to their further mortification, that they, too, are more tasteful than they are wise. But Austen’s heroines rally after this disappointment. Having previously concluded that pretty much everything is mauvais ton—“The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it,” Elizabeth Bennet says, in “Pride and Prejudice”—they commit to further developing their own faculties, becoming equal to the taste they’ve cultivated. This is another argument in favor of taste: it is one of our main mechanisms for self-improvement.

And yet it’s not quite right to see taste mainly as a means to an end. In DeWitt’s novella, Marguerite takes taste seriously in itself. She would never be so gauche as to chase self-improvement. Instead, she actually cares when jazz is performed with the right sort of swing. “The English understand wool,” DeWitt writes. “The French understand wine, cheese, bread. . . . The Germans understand precision, machines. . . . The Swiss understand discretion.” This understanding is focussed not on the self but on the thing. That’s the paradox of taste. Your taste can say a lot about you, and yet it’s not actually about you. Having good taste might orient you toward what’s good. It’s when you think you’re good, however, that you fall into its trap. ♦

In 2023, the biggest name in New York dance was that of a French jeweller, Van Cleef & Arpels. The company’s Dance Reflections festival sprawled across the city’s theatres for months, evidence of a level of sponsorship and sparkle rarely seen in the field. If there were reasons to be wary of the dance scene being dominated by the taste of one curator backed by one foreign luxury brand, there were more reasons to be grateful. Historically, the institutions of American dance have envied their European counterparts for the comparatively lavish state funding they receive, but here was a European corporation footing the bill to import high-grade dance performances to New York.

Shu Kinouchi, Noah Wang, Clay Koonar, Audrey Sides, and Hope Spears (left to right), from L.A. Dance Project, during a rehearsal of “Triptych.”

Photograph by Lenne Chai for The New Yorker

Now the festival returns, even larger than before, with sixteen mostly European productions, from Feb. 19 through March 21. Among the first offerings is L.A. Dance Project, at Perelman Performing Arts Center, with a triptych of works by its founder, Benjamin Millepied, each vaguely inspired by a precious stone. More grandly, Millepied’s company will camp out in the vastness of the Park Avenue Armory for most of March with his “Romeo & Juliet Suite,” an update on the classic work featuring handheld cameras and rotating gender pairings for the star-crossed lovers.

Before then, over at City Center, Lyon Opera Ballet brings “BIPED,” Merce Cunningham’s masterly 1999 encounter with computers and motion capture, along with “Mycelium,” a slowly evolving communal vibration by the rising choreographer Christos Papadopoulos. And, at BAM, the Ballet National de Marseille embodies “Age of Content,” an extremely online evocation of the blurring of real and virtual life, by the collective (La)Horde.

A few days later at BAM, the Trisha Brown Dance Company celebrates the brilliant stage designs of Robert Rauschenberg with a program that pairs “Set and Reset,” the canonical collaboration between Rauschenberg and Brown, with “Travelogue,” a rarely seen Cunningham work with imaginative Rauschenberg costumes and “Combine”-like set pieces that resemble Rauschenberg’s famous series incorporating painting and found objects. And those are only the February selections. The festival’s bounty is an extravagant gift.—Brian Seibert

“The House with the Keyhole,” from 2018.

Art work by Simone Fattal / Courtesy the artist / Greene Naftali / Kaufmann Repetto; Photograph by Júlia Standovár

The works of Simone Fattal seem to have emerged from the alluvial matter of primordial life. Or perhaps they are still emerging: their inchoate, sketchy bodies suggest the mystery of something struggling toward a final manifestation. In a joint presentation of the artist’s work, at Greene Naftali (through Feb. 28) and Kaufmann Repetto (through Feb. 21), Fattal’s clay and bronze sculptures, drawings, and collages reach for mythologies, metaphysics, and motifs that spring from Sumerian culture and from Sufi mystic traditions: among the works, we find allusions to the Epic of Gilgamesh and to figures from classical Arabic poetry. But a prelinguistic intuition also simmers, for example, in a set of illegible, calligraphic drawings that suggest something just preceding the nascence of writing. The forms in the galleries rise from prehistory, yet are still being born.—Zoë Hopkins

In Joe White’s “Blackout Songs,” a two-hander about an on-again, off-again couple who meet at an A.A. session, the only thing more elusive than sobriety is certainty. Scenes emerge as memories, and, like memories—especially when addled by heavy drinking—they’re partial and unreliable. Did he bring her a stolen bouquet of dying flowers, or did she bring it to him? And which one detonated their relationship early on by labelling them “drinking buddies”? Most important, could they love each other without alcohol? White’s dialogue is unsentimental but rife with anguish; Owen Teague and a seductive, destructive Abbey Lee give the pain its due. Rory McGregor’s direction supplies viewers with just the right, slight degree of disorientation.—Dan Stahl (Robert W. Wilson MCC Theatre Space; through Feb. 28.)

Minimalism characterizes all the singer-songwriter Emily Sprague’s music, but the indie folk of her band Florist is distinguished from ambient recordings that she makes solo by a sense of texture. Voice is certainly the primary factor, but there is also a full-bodied, zoomed-in quality to the band’s songs, which add pattering drums, gentle keys, and light brushes of synth to an acoustic-driven soundscape. This difference can also be heard in the distance between Florist’s 2019 album, “Emily Alone,” which strips the band’s sound to the studs—Sprague and her guitar—and the two that have followed, a self-titled 2022 album and “Jellywish” (2025). Though the configuration of the players may change from one record to the next, interplay with other musicians animates Florist’s naturalistic sound, making even the subtlest little details glow.—Sheldon Pearce (Le Poisson Rouge; Feb. 21.)

In what feels like a vestige from a more collaborative era, the Cuban contemporary-dance troupe Malpaso Dance Company is the product of a joint venture between an American institution—the Joyce Theatre Foundation—and an exceptional group of Cuban dancers and choreographers based in Havana. Malpaso’s repertory combines works by local dancemakers with international commissions, all performed with great musicality and finesse (proof that Cuban dance training, despite many challenges, is still topnotch). For its yearly run at the Joyce, Malpaso brings “Dark Meadow Suite,” its first dip into the world of Martha Graham. The suite, shorn of its set pieces by Noguchi, from 1946, is less packed with symbolism than the original, but it retains Graham’s powerful movement vocabulary, a mix of urgency and lyricism, made visible by the contrast of tension and release. Malpaso also presents a new work, by the former Kyle Abraham dancer Keerati Jinakunwiphat.—Marina Harss (Joyce Theatre; Feb. 10-15.)

Amid all the constant wondering of when things will get better, the slow drip of time may feel like a curse. But the composer Huang Ruo knows that this slowness can also offer opportunity for pause, reflection, and escape. This month, the National Sawdust Ensemble, with the mezzo-soprano Kelly Clarke and the pianist Joanne Kang, perform the New York première of Ruo’s piece “A Dust in Time,” a sixty-minute string passacaglia inspired by the sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists. The melodies came to Ruo as he was falling asleep, weaving and layering like textile threads. The work both meditates and blooms, reminding us to keep breathing as we move on through—a helpful, if temporary, antidote to our noxious moment.—Jane Bua (National Sawdust; Feb. 18.)

Alison Rossiter works with a wide variety of expired and antique photographic papers, but she doesn’t use them to make photographs. Instead, she arranges them like children’s building blocks in a frame, where the aging but undeveloped papers, in subtle shadings of brown, tan, and white, become architectural studies. Several of these groupings were inspired by Man Ray’s “Tapestry,” a patchwork-quilt-like fabric piece with a similar range of earthy colors, from 1911. In Rossiter’s show “Semblance,” all the pieces have a minimalist elegance, but perhaps the most sublime is a series of what look like off-white plinths supporting small metal blocks: tiny, ruined late-nineteenth-century daguerreotype plates that might be portals into deep space.—Vince Aletti (Yossi Milo; through March 14.)

“Send Help,” Sam Raimi’s new thriller on an old theme—a mismatched pair on a desert island—exists only for its clever twists. Linda Liddle (Rachel McAdams), a brilliant but socially awkward analyst at a financial-consulting firm, is passed over for a promised promotion by its heir-head new president, Bradley Preston (Dylan O’Brien), who nonetheless takes her on a business trip to Bangkok. When the plane crashes en route, Linda and Bradley are stranded together. Despite her mousiness, Linda (who auditioned for “Survivor”) has the skills that the injured and dependent Bradley lacks, and she makes the most of her power. Both characters have exactly the traits, however incongruous, that the plot requires, and the story is built for jump scares and gross-outs, with little concern for practicalities; its mild pleasures are hollowed out by incuriosity.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Alfred Jensen was a contemporary of New York School artists like Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, but his work was so radically different from theirs that he may as well have come from another time and place. And partly, he did: before studying art in Europe and then settling in New York, Jensen was born in Guatemala. His roots offer some clues to understanding his esotericism. Inspired by both pre-Columbian cultures and modern scientific theories, Jensen made energetic diagrams of shapes, symbols, and numbers in loud complementary colors, using thick globs of paint; the results generate a fascinating friction. The paintings seem to invite decoding but ultimately remain inscrutable—or, as the subtitle of this show puts it, “diagrammatic mysteries.”—Jillian Steinhauer (125 Newbury; through Feb. 28.)

The alt-R. & B. singer Miguel.

Photograph by Michael Drummond

The 2012 album “Kaleidoscope Dream” announced the L.A.-based singer Miguel as one of contemporary R. & B.’s torchbearers by pulling pop, rock, and soul into a singular psychedelic orbit. Hits like “Adorn” and “How Many Drinks?” have since been added to the lover-boy canon. The records that followed, “Wildheart” (2015) and “War & Leisure” (2017), displayed an even deeper experimental nature, their rapturous, pleasure-oriented tracks treating neo-soul and funk like supplemental texts of the Kama Sutra. In October, Miguel returned from an eight-year absence with “Caos,” yet another reinvention. Its existential songs consider transformation and personal evolution, mining the singer’s Afro-Mexican ancestry for searching, bilingual music that is as sprawling and genre-fluid as it is regenerative.—S.P. (Radio City Music Hall; Feb. 24.)

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• Advice for Gen Beta, from Nan Goldin and Hasan Piker
• Like you’re not still thinking about it, too
• Halle Berry on menopause

In January, 2025, Dan Bongino, then a Secret Service agent turned serial congressional candidate turned right-wing podcaster, spoke on his show about “the biggest political scandal of our time.” The F.B.I. had just released footage of a suspect in an unsolved case: a pair of pipe bombs had been left outside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic and the Republican National Committees on the eve of the insurrection at the Capitol, four years prior. (They never exploded.) But the footage appeared to have been “dramatically manipulated,” Bongino claimed, and the F.B.I. already knew that the person who had planted the bombs was an “insider” working to “create a narrative that crazy MAGA people are trying to assassinate Kamala Harris,” who was in the D.N.C. building on January 6th. If the footage was altered intentionally, then “people belong in jail,” Bongino said, his eyes wide. “Jail!” Fortunately, Kash Patel, President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming F.B.I. director, would soon be on hand to get to the bottom of the matter.

Not long after, Bongino became Patel’s No. 2 at the F.B.I. By the end of the year, he was able to tout the arrest of a man in the case. According to reports, the man had no known connections to the inside of much of anything, and had travelled to D.C. to attend a pro-Trump protest, because he had doubts about the outcome of the 2020 election. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Later, Bongino went on Fox News, another of his former professional homes, where Sean Hannity brought up his previous assertion that it was an inside job. “I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions—that’s clear,” Bongino said. “And one day I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director. And we base investigations on facts.”

Various pundits were quick to point out that Bongino had said the quiet part out loud, undercutting not only his own credibility but that of the wider MAGA mediaverse. Nor was this the first time that his past conspiracy theorizing appeared to explode on contact with the realities of government. On his podcast, Bongino had returned repeatedly to the crimes and subsequent suicide of Jeffrey Epstein, asserting that “there’s more than meets the eye there,” and that “people are gonna lose their minds if the Epstein client list is revealed.” After joining the F.B.I., he went on Fox and told viewers that Epstein had, in fact, killed himself; meanwhile, the Bureau and the Justice Department decided, in the absence of a “client list” or similar material, not to disclose anything more about the case. (So much for that.) Around the same time, Bongino, speaking on Fox again, said that he didn’t much like his new job and that it was proving tough on his family; privately, he was said to be so furious with the D.O.J.’s clumsy handling of the Epstein case that he skipped a day of work and considered resigning. Observers in old and new media concluded that he was missing his life as a podcaster, where the real power lies.

In January, Bongino finally did leave the F.B.I. Trump had told reporters that he thought Bongino “wants to go back to his show”; Bongino soon announced that he would. Appearing, again, with Hannity, Bongino defended his prior contention that some jobs traffic in facts and others in opinions. “I don’t know why this was hard for, again, these full-diaper media morons to understand,” he said. Regardless, he seemed to agree when Hannity proclaimed that “the real Dan Bongino’s back.” This past Monday, Bongino returned, on Rumble, a YouTube competitor that is popular among right-wing content creators, and was palpably in his element—at least, until his stream cut out. “Rumble is under attack, this show is under attack,” he said, after the feed was restored. “This is what these scumbags do.”

In reality, the gulf between Bongino the free-range opinionator and Bongino the fact-constrained lawman may not have been as wide as all that. His show always claimed to be rooted in reality—its tagline was “Get ready to hear the truth about America, on a show that’s not immune to the facts”—even if that claim itself was not; after Bongino suggested, on “Hannity,” that his opinions weren’t relevant to his F.B.I. work, he criticized members of the media for pushing the Russia “collusion hoax” and said that, if Trump weren’t President, “we may not have a Republic.” (This is without getting into the reports, from inside the Bureau, that Bongino was obsessed with posting on social media, at the expense of pressing operational matters. On his show this week, Bongino responded that social media is integral to the F.B.I.’s work in the digital age, adding that his detractors “can go fuck yourself.”) For all the talk of distinct roles, U-turns, and the “real Dan Bongino,” the most interesting question, to my mind, isn’t whether Bongino changed during his hiatus from right-wing podcasting. It’s whether right-wing podcasting has changed on him.

As chance and Justice Department foot-dragging would have it, Epstein was very much in the news when Bongino made his comeback, on Monday. He addressed the case, and his role in it, a little over halfway into his show. “Leadership involves frequently being misunderstood, and having to make decisions that’s gonna piss someone off,” he said. “I wanted to see the files, folks. I said, ‘Don’t let it go.’ I meant it. We got elected. We looked at it. The file was not—what was in there was not what we thought would be in there.” Two of Bongino’s competitors got into the latest dump of Epstein files much more directly (depending on your definition of “direct”). Candace Owens—whose podcast was, by at least one metric, the fastest-growing right-wing offering as of late last year, and has recently been home to increasingly baroque theorizing about the assassination of Charlie Kirk—opened her show on Monday by derisively asking, “Are we still talking about the Epstein files?” She then proceeded to do so via an extended disquisition involving Sigmund Freud, his “B’nai B’rith Freemason boys,” and child-abuse rituals. Later, Nick Fuentes described Epstein as “first and foremost, a Jew,” then scoffed at Owens for getting distracted by the occult. He also called her a “Johnny-come-lately antisemite.”

In recent months—amid the leadership vacuum left by Kirk’s killing, and particularly since the former Fox host Tucker Carlson made the inflammatory decision to record a podcast with Fuentes—much ink has been spilled on emerging schisms between the most important commentators on the right, some of them around issues such as U.S. support for Israel and the overt tolerance of antisemitism, some of them viciously personal, most of them both. This week, The Hollywood Reporter taxonomized who is fighting with whom, and drew them into the broad camps of “MAGA Moderates” (Mark Levin, Ben Shapiro) and “MAGA MANIACS” (Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly). Apparently, the “moderates” can now be said to include Alex Jones, the notorious Sandy Hook truther. Indeed, much of the spilled ink has attested to the rapid radicalization of the MAGA media firmament, especially the growing momentum of Fuentes among young people who once saw Kirk as their lodestar. (Kirk, it should be noted, reportedly loathed Fuentes.) Because MAGA is the sort of world in which a person can host a podcast one day and lead the F.B.I. the next, these ructions would seem to matter for the broader post-Trump direction of the right, at a moment when that question is itself starting to matter. Owens and Fuentes have both been critical of Trump; the latter, in particular, has cast Trump’s Administration as unserious, even a betrayal. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman who stepped down in January, has decisively broken with him. Last week, she stated that MAGA was “all a lie.”

In a 2021 Profile of Bongino in this magazine, my colleague Evan Osnos characterized him and Greene as similar figures. If Greene has since soured on Trump, Bongino still presents as an über-loyalist; indeed, watching his show this week, it struck me how much it felt like a relic of a previous age of MAGA, one preoccupied with “draining the swamp” and bashing the “lame-stream media.” One of Bongino’s top priorities now appears to be reclaiming the movement from what he has described, without naming names, as the “grifters,” “doomers,” and “blackpillers” who have complained from the sidelines about the supposedly insufficient radicalism and missed opportunities of Trump’s second term—and proving that the base isn’t anywhere near as riven as armchair pundits would have you believe.

Some commentators have contended that Bongino is now a peripheral figure in this debate, and it is indeed tempting to see him as yesterday’s man—more likely to rail against articles like the one that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter (as he did on Tuesday’s show) than be named in them. Some of the things he’s said this week have certainly been easy to mock. (“Big people do big things,” he declared at one point. “Little people talk about big people who do big things. Fact.”) And yet, I think he’s not wholly wrong to criticize media talk of a MAGA civil war. The tensions among, and apparent radicalization of, the movement’s thought leaders are real, and it’s important to start charting the frightening waters into which those élites might steer the G.O.P. in a post-Trump world. (It’ll also be interesting to see whether, and how, Trump diehards like Bongino reorient themselves to that reality.) But for now, it seems, Trump remains the glue binding the bulk of the MAGA rank and file. His message, as filtered through Bongino and his ilk, may sound old hat, but it’s still sticky, and in many ways, plenty frightening enough.

After Bongino announced his return to podcasting, questions were raised as to whether his former fans would welcome him back, given his perceived flip-flopping on the pipe bombings, Epstein, and other matters. Some prominent voices on or adjacent to the right already sounded highly critical: the comedian Dave Smith dismissed Bongino as “the anti-deep-state guy” who “exposed himself as the deep state”; Milo Yiannopoulos (remember him?) called Bongino a “pedophile’s pit bull”; Fuentes ridiculed him for prioritizing his family life above the “war” for America. (“Could you imagine if I was the deputy director of the F.B.I.?” Fuentes said. “I don’t have a wife and kids. I’d just be locked in.”) Many of the top comments underneath a Rumble video teasing Bongino’s comeback painted him as a phony, as did some of the comments that viewers left under Monday’s show. “You are a traitor,” one read. “Go move to Israel with Levin and shapiro you anti america first scum.”

The live chat that accompanied the show, however, suggested that Bongino’s fans mostly remained supportive. (“WELCOME BACK DAN!!🔥🇺🇲,” one representative note read. “Losing YOUR voice and then CHARLIE felt like a Death sentence on America!💔🇺🇲We NEEDED you back! God heard our prayers!!🔥❤️🤍💙🇺🇲.”) By Tuesday morning, Monday’s show had racked up nearly three million views on Rumble, dwarfing the figures for Owens’s and Fuentes’s competing episodes on the platform. In this era of multi-channel distribution, quantifying influence is not an exact science. But there is evidently a sizable audience for what Bongino is selling.

What Bongino is selling—in addition to the gold, nutritional supplements, and survival kits that he hawks during ad breaks, and that, to his evident bemusement, are obligatorily mentioned in media coverage of his show—is Trump, still. On Monday, this was made literal when the President phoned in for a chat. After giving his familiar spiel on how illegal immigrants were brought to the U.S. to steal the 2020 election from him, Trump said that the Republican Party ought to “nationalize” voting in various states, and promised that some “interesting things” would come out of the F.B.I.’s recent, shocking raid of an elections facility in Georgia. The mainstream media took Trump’s comments very seriously—a welcome development to me, yet also a somewhat surprising one, given the extent to which January 6th seems to have become a baseline for American politics. Onscreen, in the moment, Bongino listened, and quietly nodded along. ♦